Stan K-B: Jansy rightly points out HomSap's sensory
deficiences [hallucinations etc] and our instruments are imperfect, too. I'll
reply soon, JM, since I was an RL Gregory guinea-pig at the Cavendish
[...]
to JF: Your refinement accepted, JF. See my reply to
James Studdard/Jansy.
JM: I seem to have missed your replies
about Gregory and the one on Planck and limits.
Since I've been long familiar with several theories
about human thresholds of perception, I returned to "another Schauplatz", one of
Gustav Fechner's invention, in the Wiki. Don B.
Johnson tried to ascertain if VN had read Fechner's Vergleichende
Anatomie der Engel (Comparative Anatomy of Angels) (1825), a booklet
prefaced by William James but, unfortunately, he didn't locate it
among VN father's books.
Besides Fechner's intriguing conjectures
about Angels, we also find Das Büchlein vom Leben nach dem Tode
(1836). On Life After Death (1882) or The Little Book of Life After
Death (1904). His lectures were attended by Freud and, contrastingly,
he also inspired research in the field of "perception". Fechner
(1801-1887) was the founder of "psychophysics"
Here are excerpts from
Wikipedia, on Fechner:
Fechner is credited to have created the formula "S = KLogI" that proved the
existence of a scientific connection between the body and the mind. Fechner's
epoch-making work was his Elemente der Psychophysik (1860). He starts from the
monistic thought that bodily facts and conscious facts, though not reducible one
to the other, are different sides of one reality. His originality lies in trying
to discover an exact mathematical relation between them. The most famous outcome
of his inquiries is the law known as the Weber–Fechner law which may be
expressed as follows: "In order that the intensity of a sensation may increase
in arithmetical progression, the stimulus must increase in geometrical
progression."
Though holding good within certain limits only, the law has
been found to be immensely useful. Fechner's law implies that sensation is a
logarithmic function of physical intensity, which is impossible due to the
logarithm's singularity at zero; therefore, S. S. Stevens proposed the more
mathematically plausible power-law relation of sensation to intensity in his
famous paper entitled "To Honor Fechner and Repeal His Law.[...] Fechner's
reasoning has been criticized on the grounds that although stimuli are
composite, sensations are not. "Every sensation," says William James, "presents
itself as an indivisible unit; and it is quite impossible to read any clear
meaning into the notion that they are masses of units combined." Philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari credit Fechner as
the discoverer of a "differential unconscious" that offers a powerful
alternative to the "conflictual unconscious" posited by Freud.[...] Fechner's
world concept was highly animistic[...]Man stands midway between the souls of
plants and the souls of stars, who are angels. God, the soul of the universe,
must be conceived as having an existence analogous to men. Natural laws are just
the modes of the unfolding of God's perfection. In his last work Fechner, aged
but full of hope, contrasts this joyous "daylight view" of the world with the
dead, dreary "night view" of materialism. Fechner's work in aesthetics is also
important. He conducted experiments to show that certain abstract forms and
proportions are naturally pleasing to our senses, and gave some new
illustrations of the working of aesthetic association.
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